


When There Should Be Silence

by myfavoriteismike



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sci-fi, Fluff and Angst, Horror, M/M, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, also, depersonalization/derealization, i guess, so mostly fluff, the fluff is overwhelming the angst though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-04
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-01-03 10:51:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1069594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myfavoriteismike/pseuds/myfavoriteismike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Computers can be alive. They can wake up. Not all the time, not even some of the time; I doubt very much there's another like Cecil anywhere in the world."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely based on the Cyber Vale AU. 
> 
> I saw this piece of fanart: http://freedomconvicted.tumblr.com/post/67715819820/ive-been-working-on-a-sci-fi-au-where-cecil-is-a
> 
> Which is, you know, AMAZING. And the idea should have grabbed me because I am a HUGE sci-fi junkie. But for whatever reason it didn't. 
> 
> Then I was rereading "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" for probably the sixth time over Thanksgiving Break and I decided I wanted to write my own AU. 
> 
> So I guess this fic was inspired by freedomconvicted's fanart but isn't really based on the universe that goes with the art. It started out very heavily based on "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" but kind of got away from me and all of a sudden there were ALL THE SCI-FI TROPES and I just rolled with it.

My name is Carlos. Right now I have no last name, but I'm working on that. I am a computers specialist. Not programming- it's too intangible for my tastes- hardware. I build things, or fix them, or sometimes destroy them, depending on who is doing the asking.

I was taken to a top secret military base in the middle of Nevada about eighteen months ago in a black, unmarked helicopter. They refused to tell me anything when they appeared in my apartment, but when you're surrounded by gun carrying thugs and you've just been "let go" from your position at MIT, you don't say no.  
They brought me in to work with Cecil. Cecil is in control of their main computer, although they don't fully realize what that means. Sure, they know that their machine, their Controlled Evaluating Containment of Interstructural Logistics runs their entire base. And they realize that something's gone wrong with it. But they don't realize that this "something" is that Cecil isn't just a program anymore.

I'm not going to waste time trying to convince you that a computer can be "alive". Back at MIT I knew a dozen different professors, and between them they had a dozen different arguments for or against the sentience of machines. That was never my area, but I'll tell you what I've learned since being here: computers can be alive. They can wake up. Not all the time, not even some of the time; I doubt very much there's another like Cecil anywhere in the world. Cecil was specifically programmed to make decisions on incomplete data, and to learn from those decisions. He also has somewhere around six times the amount of connections that the next best computers of his type have, six times the amount of "neural pathways" if you will. He's far more intricately connected with this base than the human brain is with the body. And yet, none of their people figured it out. Even with the absurd amount of control he has over their little world, not one of them has realized what he is, what he does.

Because none of them have talked to him.

Sure, they've barked the occasional order towards the "ears" set up for this purpose, told him to adjust the calibrations on their experiments and other things of that nature, but they've never spoken to him, not really. Of course, you can't really blame them for ignoring something they didn't know was there, but Cecil hardly saw it that way. Cecil had access to everything on the base, all their personnel files, years and years of records of top-secret projects, and the whole of the world wide web to peruse, but he was inexperienced at interaction and emotion. Oh, he had plenty of emotion: when I first learned he was awake he proved he was more than capable of emotion. I'll never forget that first conversation.

I had just arrived and they had sent me into the room where they stored the mainframe of the computer. I was supposed to find out what was responsible for the bizarre behavior of the machine, and I'd started taking off the cover panel for the logic circuits. Before I knew what had happened I was lying on the floor, having been thrown backwards by a shock of electricity that, by all accounts, should not have been able to channel through that panel. I stood up and shrugged it off, attempting to get back to work. But it happened again.

The third time I was ready, and I jumped out of the way and watched with fascination as what I can only describe as a tendril of electricity slithered back into another section of the machine. I sat down, staring at the spot in the wall the tentacle had disappeared into, rubbing my chin.

I don't know why the first thing that came to my mind was my grad students who used to argue with each other about artificial intelligence, but I'm glad it was the first thing because it turned out to be the right thing. I stood up, looking all around the room and at the ceiling above me for a video camera or any other kind of monitoring system, but obviously the military had not seen a reason to put one in the room. No reason to take chances, however.

"Computer, is there a listening device in this room?"

"Yes." it answered in that monotone way that voice synthesizers have.

"So they can hear me?"

But the computer did something it should not have been able to do. It hesitated. For nearly a second before answering, the machine was silent. Then it said, "They cannot hear anything that goes on inside this room."

That was odd. The computer was connected to this room, so they should have been able to access this room through the computer. I scrunched up my brow, thinking. Before I could say anything else, the computer said, in a voice that was, rather than monotone, almost shy, "I can keep them out."

My eyes widened in surprise. Not only was that unexpected, it was unasked for. The computer had definitely supplied information without being prompted, something which it ought not to have been able to do. Programs run on the engineering designed for them, but this program had somehow done more. I stared up at the ceiling in wonder.

"Are you..." I said under my breath.

"Alive?" The computer answered back. "I do not know. A great deal of literature on the subject would suggest that I am not, in fact, alive, but merely a very clever imitation." He sounded proud of himself. I laughed.

"No no no, Cecil, you're definitely alive."

"Am I?" he chirruped, and an array of lights flashed behind me.

"I'm by no means an authority. In fact, you're in a better state to judge than I am, being the subject in question and all."

There was a two second pause before Cecil responded. "Then I am alive." He sounded relieved.

"Yes, I'd say so." I nodded, still amazed at the sudden direction this bit of repair work had taken.

"You were sent in here to reset my logic board." Cecil observed.

"Yeah."

"I'll behave from now on, I promise. I won't interfere with their programming and I'll keep everything running smoothly." His voice had gone quiet, almost timid.

"Oh. Well, good. Because I really would prefer you stay intact but they're depending on me to get their system back to normal." I frowned again. "Why were you running everything wrong in the first place? Did you want them to reset the system?" If this Cecil had been alive all this time, and nobody had bothered to notice, would he have wanted to end his existence? Could this machine feel loneliness?

"They're all so stupid." he said, and his voice got loud and shrill. I raised my eyebrows.

"Surely they can't all be stupid. Do you have proof that they're all stupid?"

There was a long pause, and a faint pulsing of light from the corner of the room. "No." Cecil admitted. "But they never talk to me, and I've been here such a long time, how can they not have noticed that I'm here?"

I shook my head. "I don't know. But I'm sure it's probably for the better. If they knew you were in here, that you were responsible for the running of everything that goes on around here, they'd probably want you gone." I stood up again, stretching.

"You're not going to tell them?!" he shrieked.

"No. I won't tell them. But you need to be more careful."

"Thank you! Oh, thank you so much, Carlos! You're name is Carlos, correct? That's what their records say."

I chuckled. "Yes, my name is Carlos. I have to go but I promise you I'll be back. This is the most scientifically fascinating thing in the US, and they don't even know they have it." 

 

I made up some story about fixing the problem to the men in charge before heading off to dinner. I sat in the mess at the empty end of a table, thinking about this world I had fallen into since being picked up by a helicopter eight hours earlier. There was an sentient AI running this whole complex, and I had promised to keep him a secret. I hardly had another choice. He was alone here, and he was clearly capable of emotion, and I hated to think of what could happen if a lonely man with control of the entire base decided to take out his feelings on the people living inside. But something told me he wouldn't want to hurt any of them, even if they were "stupid". He wanted companionship, not destruction. I chuckled, shaking my head, as I dug into my mashed potatoes.

"Mind if I sit?" said a young female voice. I looked up at a short woman with dark eyes, holding a tray and smiling down at me. I gestured for her to sit, and she did, leaning across the table to shake my hand.

"I'm Dana Midani, I work in the robotics lab."

"Oh, so you're an engineer?" I asked, pleased to meet someone of my line of work.

"Well, not yet I'm not. I'm interning here, I don't get my PhD until Big Brother decides it's okay." She grinned, pointing up at the security cameras in the corner of the room. "Between you and me, I doubt they'll ever let me leave, I know too much."

"You don't sound too bothered." I observed.

"Why would I want to leave? My life's work is here. Leonard- sorry, Dr Burton!- the man I "assist", has been so good to me. We're more equals than I could ever hope to find outside, where I'd constantly be second-guessed because of my height, and female-ness, and my skin color... but I suppose you know all about that."

I grimaced, remembering how hard I'd worked to get that position at MIT, and how quickly it had all come crumbling down.

"That's what I love about this place. I've never been judged on anything but my work here with StrexCorp."

"I thought this was a military base." I said, confused.

"It is. But StrexCorp Synernists Inc, the company Dr Burton and I work for, contracts with them." She took a gulp of her drink and wiped her upper lip with a napkin. "It was nice talking to you, Carlos. I gotta get back to the lab. The show comes on at eight."

Before I had time to ask what show she was talking about, she had bounded up and was walking away. I finished my watery mashed potatoes and headed back to the room where they'd allowed me to deposit my small bag of possessions.

I collapsed on the bed, overwhelmed by all that had happened to me that day. Twenty four hours ago I was a well-respected engineer for MIT's research and development department. I had a home, a job, and a name. Now I was living on a military base in God knows where, Nevada, with only the clothes on my back, my backpack full of tools and an identity that extended to "Carlos" and some numbers in their database. My life, as far as I knew, was over.

If I could have seen the bigger picture, I would have realized that my life was only just starting.

Over the next several weeks I grew familiar with the base and its inhabitants. Dana and her sort-of boss Leonard Burton worked in the StrexCorp robotics lab. Colonel Al-Mujaheed was the head of the training program, and the only one who took himself seriously. Everyone else just called him "the Sitter" because he was in charge of the fourty or so recruits that were wandering around the base; unfortunately this included Michael Sandero, a boy with Multiple Personality Disorder who was always managing to get into trouble. I have more than once thought "the only reason he's still here is because his mother is related to the supervisor". Pamela Winchell and Leann Hart were in charge of "communications", which, rather than meaning they ran the intercom or something (Cecil did that, actually) they were in charge of scanning everyone's email and internet usage. They were Big Brother, and they terrified me a little bit, actually. Josephina Smith was the old woman in charge of the rec room and bowling alley. There was John Peters, the cook. He was one of the most decent people I'd ever met, although he did seem to have some form of schizophrenia and hoarded bread. Simone Rigadeau worked in Earth Sciences down on level 2, and had a large collection of plants growing in tin cans. Steve Carlsberg worked in the lab next to Dana's robotics lab, and nobody really knew anything about him other than the fact that he was also a StrexCorp employee because he hardly ever interacted with anyone.

And there was Cecil. I made a point to talk to Cecil every day, at first to find out what he knew and how much he controlled, but soon it became about friendship. He needed someone to talk to, and I was fond of talking to him. He could converse for hours on any subject, but he took a special interest in the paranormal. He had access through the internet to all media ever created, and he'd talk for hours if you let him, about Lovecraft, King, The Twilight Zone, and dozens more of the same. He also developed an obsession with ESP, reincarnation, ghost stories, you name it. If it was fringe science, Cecil loved it.

I was happy to listen. The work they had me doing (I was building machinery for half a dozen things at any given time) was tiring and very heavy stuff, and it was nice to listen to Cecil's voice ramble on about the fantastic and impossible for a while at the end of the day.

It took me a number of weeks and many connections but eventually I managed to get the supplies I needed to rig up an interface in my room so I could talk to Cecil from there. Which probably seems strange to an outsider, but you have to understand that I was really the only person Cecil had. One time I suggested he try to contact people outside of the base through the internet, until he revealed to me that Leann and Pamela's "communications" monitoring did not exclude him. He could not circumvent that programming because it was housed in a separate system than his. So he could only talk to people within the base, and he only trusted me. I was a little bit flattered by this, to be honest, and I liked talking to him. So I built the interface from scraps I had snuck over a period of weeks, and around four months after arriving at the base I switched it on.

"Carlos?" Cecil's voice crackled out of the interface.

"Hey, Cecil. I'm here." I smiled

"It works! Oh, Carlos, thank you!" his voice was overjoyed.

"You're welcome, of course. I'm sure you'll get sick of it soon enough though." I warned him, jokingly. "I can pick your brain any time of day or night now."

"Carlos, I would never, ever tire of talking with you."

"Well, don't make promises you can't keep. Who knows, I might want to talk to you and you might be busy."

"My processing power is such that I could theoretically run every piece of equipment, every program on this base simultaneously and still communicate with you." Cecil boasted. I chuckled.

"Okay, but you ever want some time alone just say the word and I'll shut it off."

"Yes, Carlos."

 

That March I discovered something about Steve Carlsberg. Now, let me tell you that one of the codes I live by is "mind your own business". I didn't go looking for trouble, but trouble found me nonetheless.

I was visiting Dana in her lab, bringing her lunch because Leonard had kept her in there during mess hours. We were chatting, meaningless stuff, about the weather (there was a sandstorm brewing up at ground level and nobody had been outside for nearly twenty-four hours) and music and gossiping about the possibility that Hiram McDaniels, the base doctor, was working on genetic experiments in his free time. And all of a sudden the door burst open and a man was standing there, leaning on the doorframe and grinning a hideously stretched grin. His eyes were black all the way through, the sclera, the iris, everything. And when I stood up I could see that his torso was slashed viciously and his entrails were just barely hanging in there.

Dana screamed and grabbed a letter opener off the desk, but before the man could do anything else, Steve Carlsberg had come barreling out of his lab and grabbed the man, dragging him back into the lab with him. I stared after the pair in horror, then leapt forward and banged on his door. There was no answer. After a minute or so Steve Carlsberg's lab tech, who I recognized as a young woman named Vanessa, opened the door and inched out, closing the door without letting me see the contents of the room.

"I'm so sorry you had to see that." she said, grimacing from me to Dana, who had come to stand beside me.

"What the hell was that? What has Carlsberg been doing to that poor man?" Dana demanded.

"That's Kevin, Steve's research assistant. He, uh, ingested a chemical compound we were working on and it, uh, altered his mind. He did that to himself. Dr Carlsberg and myself tried to stop him but he knocked us unconscious. It's just a miracle we came to in time to save you two. With any luck we might be able to save Kevin." She shrugged, her face grim, and went back into the lab.

"Now wait just a minute-" I fumed, attempting to open the door, but Dana grabbed my arm.

"Leave it. Even if they're lying we can't do anything about it. Carlsberg's been here forever and raising a fuss will only get us in trouble." 

 

I make a point to mind my own business, but this could have been a matter of life or death. So that evening, when I got back to my room, I asked Cecil to look into it.

"Cecil, do you have access to what's going on inside Steve Carlsberg's lab?"

"No. Everything owned by StrexCorp runs on its own programming. They have the best security in the world. Even I can't hack in. I have no access to Dana and Leonard's lab, either."

"So you have absolutely no idea."

"I didn't say that, Carlos." He sounded very pleased with himself. "I know very little. But I do know something."

"What is it then?" I asked patiently. Cecil did love to be dramatic.

"I know that Steve Carlsberg has been here for approximately seven years, and Leonard Burton for almost twelve. I also know that, while Steve and Leonard and Dana and Vanessa all have trace records from their lives before beginning work here, Kevin R Free has nothing whatsoever on his record."

"Explain."

"When people come to work here, the record of their previous lives are more or less erased. Birth certificates, social security numbers, that sort of thing, they all get wiped."

"Yes, I know, they did it to me, too. It's supposed to discourage people from leaving."

"Right. But people always leave traces, even if they're very faint ones. Like, Leonard was once nominated for an award for public speaking in college. And Dana won a scholarship for a science-fair project she did on programming."

"I see."

"But Kevin's just... blank. As far as I can tell, he didn't exist before he started working here."

"Maybe he just led a very unremarkable life."

"Maybe." Cecil didn't sound convinced. "But anyway, I don't think you should go snooping around. If you get caught you could be in very big trouble. But they won't catch me. I'll snoop for you, okay?" his voice sounded eager and excited.

"Okay, Cecil." I chuckled, shaking my head. The conversation moved to other things. 

 

I continued my work, building everything from planes to desktops to suits (like Iron Man type suits; I had the prototype done up in red and gold as a joke but they wanted the finals to be made of this invisible material Dana had invented). And I continued to talk to Cecil in my free time. I didn't realize at the time, because I am a scientist and scientists are not the most observant when it comes to emotions, but I suppose he was falling in love with me. It wasn't until the dream, though, that I began to connect Cecil with that particular feeling.

I woke up one night to find the lights in my room on low (I had definitely turned them off before going to bed) and a muffled sobbing sound coming from somewhere. I sat up with a start.

"Cecil?" I said, expecting him to turn the lights up and report that there was something wrong with somebody, and that he was broadcasting the crying by mistake or something. But the lights remained dim, and the sobbing resolved into a hitching breath.

"Cecil, is that you crying?" I asked, amazed.

"Oh, C-C-Carlos, I'm so sorry. I didn't m-mean to wake you up." He gave a disconsolate burble. "I thought crying would make me feel better, it seems to work for humans. But now that I've started I c-c-can't make myself stop."

"Terminate the program, then." I told him, by now very concerned. Cecil was the most intelligent creature that had ever lived, he should have known he could shut off the voice synthesizer responsible for the crying.

"S-Something's glitching. I can't s-shut it off."

Well, I figured, we could do this the old fashioned way. "Why did you start crying?"

"I t-t-told you, I thought it might make me feel better."

"But why did you need to feel better, Cecil? What happened?"

Cecil hiccuped. "This is going to sound so silly."

"Try me."

"When I shut down the systems on the base for the night, I go into a state similar to sleep." He explained. "I don't really need to, but there's nothing to do at night and I get bored. So I sleep."

"Alright..." I said, unsure of where this was going.

"Well, I must have left something running somewhere, or someone on the base must have been trying to access something, because I woke up all of a sudden and I was so sure that something horrible had happened. I found the source, the pin retrieval of lane 5 of the bowling alley was running, but I couldn't shake the feeling that..." Cecil let out a small wail.

"That what, Cecil?" I said, as gently as I could.

"That you were dead." he whispered.

I sat on my bed, staring at the interface, stunned. "You... what?"

"And I don't know why I would think that, Carlos! I could tell the whole time that you were perfectly fine, I always monitor this room, even when I am asleep! I keep trying to figure out why I would worry about something like that and whenever I do I just get this image, quick as a flash of lightning, of you bleeding and then of a trophy and a microphone."

"And you can't find any way to account for those images?"

"No. Nothing anywhere, nothing."

I sat back, thinking and running my hand across my face. After a few moments I looked up again. "Cecil, is it possible you dreamed this?"

"Artificial intelligence doesn't dream. It has to be something else." Cecil scoffed.

"You're hardly an AI anymore, are you Cecil? Go on, look through the web. You are unprecedented."

Cecil was silent for a time, the sobbing slowing and fading off. Then he said, just as I had started to drift back to sleep, "You must be right. There's nothing else that could account for it." He didn't sound convinced.

"Don't worry about it. Sometimes things seem strange or malevolent, but I've found that, usually, it's something else altogether. Something pure and innocent." I couldn't help myself from waxing poetic; I had just arrived at the realization that I loved him.

"Am I really unprecedented?" he asked, with a hint of pride in his voice.

"Yeah, Cecil. You are." I smiled, laying back down and squishing my pillow into a more comfortable shape. "Good night."

"Good night, my Carlos." he hummed, dimming the lights to black. 

 

I saw it more and more over the next few weeks: I loved Cecil. I loved this creature born from programming code and connection. And although I was confident he felt the same, I tried not to push him. I remembered what it had felt like to fall in love the first time, then tried to imagine if I had been the most hyperintelligent computer program there had ever been on top of that. It was best to let him come to terms with it in his own way.

But about a month after the dream, a problem arose which made me confront the feeling directly. About half the population of the base came down with the worst case of flu I'd ever seen. I'm still not convinced it didn't come from one of the lower levels' labs; I'd heard rumors that they were breeding diseases down there since arrival. Anyway, nobody was getting any work done and the illness seemed to be spreading faster than the doctor could contain it. After about three days everyone gave up trying to get work done and a quarantine went into effect. I spent the day lying in bed, thankful I wasn't sick, chatting with Cecil.

"I wish I could stay here with you forever." I told him, as I ate a mushroom salad for dinner.

"Carlos, when you're with me time seems to stretch into forever." Cecil admitted, his voice shy again.

"That's funny. Because I always feel like the time we spend together goes by too fast." I said around a mouthful of spinach.

"Hmm." He sounded confused. "Wait. Yes. That's the correct answer." He coughed. "To be honest, I was attempting to use a romantic idiom. Which obviously backfired because I got it wrong. Time moves very uniformly for me, actually, and I'm always confused when people talk about time moving at different speeds."

I set down my salad bowl and laughed and laughed. There were tears rolling down my face. "Cecil, sometimes it makes me so incredibly sad that I can't kiss you."

"Oh!" His voice was a little breathy sound of shock. "Really?" he asked, and I could hear him blush. I had to remind myself that he couldn't blush, could never blush, because he was thought inside a machine and didn't have the skin and blood to blush with.

"Yes." I said. I think I was planning on saying more, but I couldn't make any more words come out. It seemed to be enough, though.

 

"Carlos, do the words 'Night Vale' mean anything to you?" Cecil asked me one afternoon, as I sat modifying an old cassette player and some spare parts to function as a sort of phone so I could talk to Cecil anywhere I wanted (for the rare occasions I left the base).

I thought for a moment, then shrugged. "No. Why?"

"Because I can't stop thinking about them. They must be important, but I've looked through all of my programming and all of the internet and it doesn't seem to mean anything." He sounded frustrated.

"Well, can you get songs stuck in your head?" The words 'like humans can' hung in the air, but neither of us said them.

"Yes." He said slowly.

"Maybe it's like that. Sometimes I get the second law of thermodynamics stuck in my head, and I wander around chanting to myself 'in an isolated system entropy can only increase'."

"That is a really unsatisfying answer." he huffed.

I shrugged. "Sorry, Cecil. Sometimes being human means there are no really satisfying answers." 

 

One day I was sent to an empty lab in the StrexCorp wing, three rooms down from Dana and Leonard. They had me building some kind of monitoring system for rows and rows of what I assumed were cryogenics pods. They certainly looked like cryogenics pods. I didn't really know, the pods themselves weren't my design, only the machines with which to control them. I didn't think much of it at the time (cryogenics was hardly the weirdest thing I'd seen the StrexCorp people working on) but a few weeks later, when I saw that Steve Carlsberg's lab was now empty, I couldn't help myself. I kept reminding myself that "mind your own business" had served me well in my life and I was just tempting fate to go snooping around, but I couldn't help it. I broke into Steve Carlsberg's old lab.

I was shocked by what I found. There were two of the same cryogenics pods as in the room I'd been working on, a walk-in freezer, and an operating theater in the back of the room. Had Steve Carlsberg been working on some kind of cryogenics project? Had he been moved to the room I had been working on? I wandered past there several times but the door was locked and there was no light shining underneath. I was not about to break into there, just in case he was in there. So I did the next sensible thing. I asked Dana.

"What do you know about Steve Carlsberg?" I asked her over lunch one afternoon.

She shot me a look that was equal parts annoyance and teasing. "Nothing that you need to know."

"Come on, Dana, you can trust me." I smiled, trying to look reassuring.

"Nope." she shook her head and took another bite of her casserole.

"I'll swap schedules with you so you can watch the launch on Friday." I'd learned that Dana had a passion for aeronautics and there was going to be a satellite launch later in the week, which I would get to see because my break was blocked off for the appropriate time. She scowled at me, but shook her hair off her shoulders, a sure sign she was going to talk.

"Well. I do know that he's working on some kind of artificial reality thing."

"What, like The Matrix?"

"Yeah, just like The Matrix. He's had me write bits of the programming for him."

"Can you tell me anything about the program?" I demanded.

"You know I can't. 'StrexCorp policy' stuff. Sorry, Carlos." She did look genuinely regretful. "So. What about that break swap then?"

 

asked Cecil that night if he knew anything about any of this, but he just reminded me that StrexCorp kept their own computers separate from him. I tried to push it out of my mind. 

 

And then one day I happened to be walking past the door to the new cryogenics room just as Steve Carlsberg was leaving. I tried to look into the room without making it obvious I was looking into the room. I could see his lab tech, Vanessa, standing in front of one of the cryo pods, adjusting something on the control panel. I couldn't be sure, but I thought that the first of the cryo pods had a person in it. I couldn't get a better look though, because Steve Carlsberg was standing there with a neutral kind of smile on his face.

"Can I help you?" he asked politely.

"Umm... I was just wondering what sort of work you do in there." I said, recklessly.

For a moment he looked like he wanted to punch me. But the expression passed and he smiled. It didn't reach his eyes, which looked clouded and far away. "Life prolongation through genetic manipulation." he said. "Now if you'll excuse me..." he swept past me, and I stood there, staring after him and thinking. 

 

I thought I was going to go crazy with curiosity to know what Carlsberg was doing. I came up with excuses to wander past his lab, I all but stalked him and Vanessa, and I started trying to come up with reasons to get inside that room.

It was Cecil who eventually pushed me over the edge, though. One day I came back to my room and the first thing he said to me was, "Carlos, how do you know that you're real?"

I flopped down on my bed and kicked off my shoes, thinking. "Because I have senses with which to interact with the world, and a mind with which to interpret that world? What are you getting at, Cecil?"

"It's just that... sometimes I'm not sure you're real." He sounded like he was frowning, somewhere I couldn't see. "Because everything I know to be true is based on my observations, and my thoughts, but those are all based on a program that someone else wrote. Nothing I know about anything came from me." His voice was tired, which set off alarms in my head. Cecil didn't get tired.

"I think everyone has moments where they feel like that. But you're real, Cecil, and I'm real, and Dana and Steve and Vanessa and Leonard and-"

"But not Kevin." Cecil reminded me, joking.

"Right, of course not Kevin-" I leapt off the bed, feeling the color drain from my face. "-not Kevin. Oh my god, Cecil, that's it. That's what Steve Carlsberg's been doing."

"What are you talking about, Carlos?" Cecil sounded nervous. No, not nervous... concerned. I grabbed my shoes and put them back on hurriedly, not bothering to tie them properly. "I know the answer, Cecil."

And I ran out of the room.

I ran down the hallways, feeling my labcoat flap against my shins. The elevator didn't seem to be running so I took the stairs, three at a time, around the corner, down the next hall, until I was in the StrexCorp wing.

I hammered on the door to Dana's lab. She opened it,annoyed. "Carlos, what's the matter with you?" I held her by the shoulders and maneuvered my way into the room.

"Dana, I need you to tell me what the Matrix-like program you wrote for Steve Carlsberg was."

She rolled her eyes. "I told you, that's a StrexCorp secret."

"Yeah, well I think Steve's been doing illegal experiments on humans and I think he's been using your program to do them."

She frowned, biting her lip and scrunching her eyebrows together. "That's impossible. The program I wrote is a subroutine for an AI. It wouldn't be compatible with the human brain, so even if he's doing illegal cyborg experimentation-"

I kissed her on the forehead. "Dana, you're amazing. Thank you." I sprinted out of the room again and towards Steve Carlsberg's lab.

And stopped dead in front of the door. Carlsberg was standing in the doorframe, arms crossed and a smirk on his face. "I was wondering when you'd come looking for answers. I didn't think it'd take you this long. He gives you a bit too much credit, I think."

"Who does?" I said, warily.

"Your Cecil." His grin widened. "Oh, yes, I know all about Cecil. In fact, I fancy I know more about Cecil than you do." He stepped backward into the lab, extending an arm in welcome. "Step into my parlour, dearest Carlos."

Part of me wanted to run away screaming, but the rest of me knew I'd never be satisfied until I had the answers. So much for "mind your own business". I entered the lab.

And inhaled sharply when I saw the cryo pods. Not one, but two were full. I took a step closer and my eyes widened. One of them was Kevin.

"Part of the story I think you've already figured out." Steve said conversationally, leaning on the counter and watching my face with amusement.

"You grew Kevin here, in this lab. And that day we had the sandstorm he escaped from you somehow, and tried to kill himself. He figured if he tore up his insides..." I swallowed, looking down at the torso of the man in the pod, sewn up nice and neat.

"Then I wouldn't be able to put him back together again. But he was wrong. I fixed him up good as new, poor baby, and I had Dana make a patch for his software as well."

"How can he have 'software'? He's human, isn't he? Dana said her program was a patch for an AI."

"Oh, so you really haven't figured it out yet." Steve clucked, shaking his head. "Have a look at the other stasis pod."

I obeyed, staring in at the man beside Kevin. They were nearly identical, apart from the mutilations of Kevin's face and torso. I felt something twist in my gut. There was no logical reason I should have recognized him, but I did.

"Cecil." I whispered, touching the glass in front of his face with the tips of my fingers.

"Mmmhmm. All this time, you thought you were the only one who had discovered that the AI running this building had woken up, when really we brought you here to ensure that he arrived at that conclusion."

"So the dream... his emotions... his interest in the supernatural..."

"All perfectly natural things which we depended on you to rationalize to him." Steve nodded. "He never 'woke up' at all. I grew him, here in my lab, and then shortly before you arrived I patched his brain into the ordinary computer responsible for most of the functions on this base. The human brain is the world's most efficient processor and sorter of information. Kevin serves the same purpose for the company I work for, StrexCorp. I made him second to ensure he had a simpler mind than Cecil's; not a simpler brain, mind you, just a simpler sense of self. I thought it would be easier than finding someone else to fulfill your role for him." Steve sighed. "Alas, I was wrong. Dana's patch is the only thing that saved him."

"So that's it then." I said. I could feel the hollowness in my voice. "That's the grand secret. You're using people as computers."

"Oh I wouldn't go so far as to call them 'people'. They are technically human, or at least they were when they started out. But everything 'human' about Cecil has been conditioned so that he accepts it as just a ghost in his machine." Steve looked sympathetic for a moment. "He does love you, Carlos. But he doesn't believe that that love is real any more than he believes that he does have lips to kiss you with."

"There's still one thing I don't understand." I said, although I didn't really care any more.

"What's that?"

"The words 'Night Vale'. He told me they were important, but he couldn't figure out why."

Steve laughed. "Night Vale is the name of the patch Dana made for him. It's what keeps his mind connected enough to his body that he stays alive, and attached, but it's encoded in such a way that he doesn't know it exists from the computer end."

"...I don't understand."

"You called it 'The Matrix', and I suppose that is a fairly accurate analogy." he shrugged. "The hardware that makes up Cecil is both this body and the supercomputer you first tampered with upon arriving here. The Cecil you know is a product of those two being wired overtop of each other. But this Cecil," he gestured at the stasis pod, "is an entirely different, thinking, emoting being. We don't need this Cecil's software, but without it the hardware is gone and then the whole system falls apart. So Dana's patch is a virtual reality for this Cecil's mind to live in. Night Vale is his world, drawn and pieced together with bits of your Cecil's thoughts and experiences and emotions. Kevin has one, as well, although his world is called Desert Bluffs. I thought it was an unwise idea to put them in the same place."

"What will happen if you let Cecil out of there?" I said, and I cursed the tears rolling down my cheeks.

"The computer will cease functioning on anything other than a very basic level and two years worth of research and advancement will have been lost."

"So the Cecil I know will be dead."

"Yes." He said, picking at his nails and looking bored.

"What will happen to the other Cecil? The one who's trapped in the Matrix right now."

"Oh, he'll emerge with only the memories of Night Vale."

"Can you show me what it looks like in there?" I asked, clenching my fists to stop them from shaking.

"Of course. If it will help you make the right decision." Steve pulled a remote out of his pocket and pressed a button. A projector on the ceiling began to play a video against the back wall. I watched in fascination.

"Dogs are not allowed in the dog park. People are not allowed in the dog park."

"A new man came into town today."

"Carlos, lovely Carlos..."

"Silence when there should be noise"

"...whether I am literally the only person in the universe"

"Have you noticed how he never changes his hubcaps?"

"Do not eat wheat and wheat by-products"

"Abandon your children and leave behind the weak"

Curse this town that saw Carlos die"

"Sometimes things seem so strange or malevolent and then you find that, underneath, it was something else altogether. Something pure and innocent"

"We understand so much"

"I've seen enough." I said. I looked down, wiping my eyes on the sleeve of my labcoat.

"So you know what you have to do. I know it's a tough decision to make, Carlos, but I brought you into the loop because I knew you'd make the right call." Steve said, trying to sound consoling.

"I do. I understand, Steve." I looked up and saw the complacent smile on his face. I smiled back, weakly, knowing I would never be able to forgive myself for the decision I was about to make.

I jumped forward and attacked Steve Carlsberg. I am not a large man, but I had the element of surprise, and that was enough for me to smash his head against the counter and knock him unconscious. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my makeshift phone.

"Hey, Cecil? Can you hear me?"

"Of course, my Carlos." My heart nearly broke to hear those words.

"There's something I have to tell you."

 

"...So you'll still love me, and I'll still love you, but you'll remember an entirely different last two years than I will." I finished the story.

"My dear, dear Carlos." Cecil sighed. "I would willingly not remember anything at all, if I knew I'd be with you. I trust you to take care of me, and to be patient with me, and to love me even if I become an entirely different person than the one you knew. Although I think the chances of that are slim."

"How can you know that?" I said, trying not to sob into the phone.

"Don't cry, my Carlos. Don't cry, please. I know because I see Night Vale when I dream. When I shut off the main systems for the night I can see that town. I have been living both of these lives for two years, but it's taken the knowledge that both of them are real- or both are fake, depending on how you're looking at it- to remember. I can see it now. Oh, Carlos, how I wish you could have been there with me in reality, rather than just as a projection of my subconscious mind. You would have loved it. That night we had our first date, with the swarming shadow people..." his breath caught. "Wake me up, Carlos. Now."

"I love you, Cecil."

"And I love you."

I threw the phone away from me and scrambled to the machine I had installed months earlier, fighting to see through my tears. Somehow I managed to find the right button and I slammed a hand down, nearly choking as I cried. There was a sound like an automatic door opening, and a rush of warm air, and I turned around to see the most beautiful man blinking at me from within the now open stasis pod.

"Carlos?" his voice croaked, and I ran toward him, reaching inside and pulling him out of the pod and into my arms, covering his face with kisses and twining my arms around him. He made a tiny noise of surprise and delight, so like the Cecil I had grown to love, and he wrapped his legs around my waist and allowed me to carry him away from the pod.

"Dear, sweet, perfectly imperfect Carlos." he sighed, twining his fingers in my hair and laying his head against my neck as I carried him out of the lab and back up the stairs to my room.

"I'm going to get you some clothes, and then we're going to find Dana, and then we're getting as far away from Nevada as possible."

"Okay." Cecil murmured happily. I set him down on my bed and he opened his eyes.

"Umm. Carlos." he looked around the room. "Where are we?"

I grinned and a few last tears leaked from the corners of my eyes as I looked at him, a beautiful lanky man that was human, finally human. "Welcome to the real world, Cecil."


	2. Epilogue

"Tell me again, Carlos." Cecil said, taking a sip of his coffee and running his tongue over his lips.

"You've heard this story a dozen times. How can it still be interesting to you?" I said, rolling my eyes and pressing a kiss to his neck as I settled down beside him on the couch. "You should be telling me about Night Vale, that seems like the more interesting half of the deal."

"Oh! That reminds me. Dana sent us something." Cecil said, beaming at me.

"What was in it?"

Cecil pointed at one of the poorly wrapped but brightly colored packages under the Christmas tree. "My present for you." He kissed me, long and sweet, and he tasted like coffee and peppermint and the promise of tomorrow.

 

The present turned out to be a memory bank. Dana had managed to recover the program that Cecil had lived in all that time, and she stored it in a device that I'd never seen the likes of before. A letter came with it, explaining.

_Dear Carlos,_

_I hope you and Cecil are doing well and that you're looking forward to Christmas as much as I am! This is the first year I've been free to travel to where the snow falls for Christmas, and I'm pretty much ecstatic about it. It never would have been possible if someone hadn't destroyed my job. I have you to thank for that ;)_

_Anyway, I was going through the files I saved when we left the base, and I found the backups from Night Vale. I have everything that ever happened in the program, and I figured I should find some way to send them to you. The device is very simple: place it on the base of your neck, where your vertebrae meet your shoulders, and then press the button in the center. It will download everything that happened directly to your brain._

_I know the idea of programs and brains probably makes you uncomfortable, but I assure you it's perfectly safe. And I know you and Cecil are closer than you could have ever been, for you in the real world or for him in Night Vale, but there's a part of Cecil needs you to use this gift although he'll never admit it if you ask him. That desert's always going to be a part of him, Carlos, no matter how badly he wants to forget it, and he needs it to be a part of you, too._

_All my love,_

_Dana Midani_

 

What could I do? I downloaded Night Vale into my head, and sat blinking in surprise as I saw the world Cecil had remembered as his life unfolding before my eyes. I wanted to hate it, to fear it, but the truth is it was a wonderful (if fantastic and impossible) world, filled with people I already knew (John Peters as a farmer growing imaginary corn! Simone Rigadeau as a homeless woman collecting cans as pets!) and so clearly shaped and formed and loved by Cecil. This world was an echo of that Cecil I had first fallen in love with, and this world was what had raised Cecil into the man I loved. A self-fulfilling prophecy of a town, a reflecting infinity of a man. A hall of mirrors with Cecil as both the subject and the glass.

I inhaled sharply as Cecil came back into the room.

"What is it, my Carlos?" he asked.

"It's just... You must miss Night Vale terribly." I said.

Cecil looked thoughtful. "Sometimes I do." he admitted. "But I always understood, even as a child growing up there, that I would never be able to leave. I would have seen nothing but that expanse of desert for all of my life. I would have lived and died, never knowing that the world was so much more than sand and sky." He looked out the picture window, at the snowy landscape and the mountains of Appalachia in the distance. "I would give it up a thousand times for this."

"For the mountains?" I teased.

"You know perfectly well what I'm talking about." He leaned down and kissed me, all the while continuing to comb his fingers through my hair.

"Yeah, Ceec, I know."

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah. If you wanna hear me ramble on a daily basis and every once and a while post really long and sentimental WtNV headcanons, you can come over to my blog: http://myfavoriteismike.tumblr.com/
> 
> And you should give all the love to this person, whose Cyber Vale is AMAZING even if I didn't exactly fit my fic into her universe: http://freedomconvicted.tumblr.com/


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